Blood and Tears will shed over an Ancient Prophecy
The game play of Odin Sphere may seem puzzling at first, but its really simple. Your character will start off at home base. You can talk to folks around the area, which isn’t necessary, and head for the exit. You’ll be brought to a world map with many kingdoms in sight. Since the story is scripted, you can only advance where the game allows you to. After entering the kingdom, you’ll be introduced with a brief cut-scene and enter battle. When you advance to the Final Boss in that current stage, you’ll watch another cut-scene, slay the boss, go on to the next chapter and advance to the next kingdom. It’s the same routine with all the other characters, and unfortunately it gets old really quick. Each regions on the world map contains battle stages, sub-boss stages, rest stages, and Boss stage. The regions are broken into spheres and are connected by lines. When you are in a stage, you are greeted with a large 2-d plane that is built like a loop. Going far to the right will land you back on the left side of the screen, the same goes with the opposite. Your main task is to annihilate all enemies on stage to advance to the next sphere. After every completed stage, you’ll be judged by your clear time, damage bonus, and will be given an overall score. A chest will fall out of the sky after you’ve completed a stage, the items inside depends on the overall score you’ve earned. Each stage has different difficulty levels ranging from 1-5 stars. If it becomes a problem, you can access the menu option and adjust the difficulty to easy, normal, or hard. Every rest stage and base has a vendor that will sell and buy items. If your full on unwanted items, or need spare health, these are usually the perfect opportunities to dump your unneeded junk and get all the goodies you need. After selecting the items you want, you’ll be paying with 5 different coins, kind of like coins you have at home. Money is scarce in Odin Sphere, make sure you don’t go overboard with your money.
The chunk of the game play is in the combat. Each character plays a different, but they still have the same basic moves. You can pull off a 3 hit combo, perform an upward slash, a sweep attack, jump, crouch, use items, and absorb phozons. Adding to this, each character also has their own unique special skills and Psypher skills. Gwendolyn for example can glide in the air and defend with her shield, while Oswald has the ability to transform into the Shadow Knight. Mercedes plays absolutely different from all the other characters. She carries a bow and fire bolts with unlimited ammo. Being a fairy, she can naturally fly across the screen and attack mid-air.
If combat was that simplistic, this wouldn’t be an RPG. On the top left corner lies a Power Gauge. Much like the Star Ocean’s Fury meter, the Power Gauge will deplete after every attack. Once it completely depletes, the character will be stunned and vulnerable to attacks. Absorbing phozons and remaining inactive will slowly build up the POW meter. Mercedes POW meter works a little different. Her POW meter is replaced with an AMMO meter. Once she runs out of bolts, she needs to remain on ground and reload. She can also reload by absorbing phozons.
Every time an enemy is defeated, magical energies called phozons will be released. Absorbing phozons will increase the character’s overall psypher level and new skills. You can also get phozons after a successful alchemy mix, or planting a seed, which I’ll get to in a moment. When you land continuous attacks, you’ll perform a “Chain”. Every time you Chain attack, your chance of dealing critical damages rises and the chances of enemies dropping an item will increase. If you were to get hit or stopped attacking after awhile, the chain will break and you’ll have to start a new chain.
Character’s have two types of growth to work on. One is their “Psypher Level”. Psyphers are magical stones that has the ability to absorb phozons. The more phozons you absorb, the more experience you’ll earn and the stronger your psypher will become. As it levels up, you’ll earn new psypher skills and your character will overall deal more damage and take in less damage. The other growth is the “HP Level”. Your current total HP will be raised as you gain experience and level up your HP. Gaining experience for HP requires you to eat food. You can buy these foods in shops or loot them from the field. You can even grow your own food through planting seeds in the battlefield, which I’ll get to in a moment. Planting seeds and harvesting Fruits aren’t crucial to the game play, but can make life much more easier. When your character consumes food, their actions will be delayed to consume the food, leaving them vulnerable to attacks. Its always a good idea to make sure your eating ripe fruits and fresh foods in a safe area. To start off, you must first have a seed in your inventory. Open your item ring and search for it in your inventory, and plant it in the battlefield. Next, allow the seed to absorb phozons from the air. Each seed requires a different amount of phozons. Some requires only 5, while others seek 30 phozons, make sure you have enough phozons available before you start planting. Finally once the fruit has grown and ripe, strike the fruit off the plant and pick it up off the ground. If you leave it too long, it will rotten, which means it’ll take longer to consume and restore less hp than usual. You can find vegetables that grow underground called Mandragoras. Mandragoras are featured in key recipes in restaurants and necessary alchemy ingredients. You can’t see them since their hiding underground, but if you listen carefully, you’ll hear it make a sound as you pass them by. To surface it, jump up and land on the ground above it to scare it out. Once it comes out, attack it before it runs away and pick it up. Some Mandragoras will attack you when provoked, keep that in mind.
Alchemy plays a big role in defeating those beefed up boss battles. You can make certain potions by combining certain items with Materials. Whether you get an item you want depends if you have collected the recipe for it. To start, you need to have a base Material in your inventory. Select that inventory, then select an item to combine with that material, the resulting item will show. After mixing the items together, the resulting item will fall to the ground and phozons will be released. The items you create can make boss battles seem like a breeze. Some characters like Cornelius almost requires Alchemy such as Napalm to kill off those annoying slugs in chapter 6. You’ll encounter plenty of materials for alchemy, though you don’t always need them, you can always sell them at the merchant.
Another neat trick is the ability to raise chickens in the battlefield. Raising chickens can recover lots of health and gain plenty of exp for your HP. To raise a chicken, you first need to find an egg. Select the egg and allow it to hatch on its own. After it hatches, drop three seeds to feed it, it’ll immediately become a chicken. Once it becomes a chicken, you can feed it more seeds to hatch an egg for every seed, or strike it for a recipe or eat it by itself.
Pooka’s Village will become available once you hit a certain point in the story. It is not vital that you come here to feast, but it’s a cool addition nonetheless. There are two restaurants that require you to bring in new recipes and share it with the owner. After sharing the recipe, you’ll be able to place an order by scrolling through the menus with the ingredients listed on them. If you have the required ingredients, you can order that dish and your character will begin to stuff their face. The foods here restore a tremendous amount of hp and some can even be ordered for take-out. Now with the good stuff out of the way, lets get to the problems with Odin Sphere. Apparently we can gather seeds, harvest fruits, raise hens, use alchemy, and gather ingredients. That means your going to have a large inventory to carry all that stuff, the problem lies within the inventory itself. Space is scarce, you’ll frequently pick up new items and drop down old ones. You have a total of 7 or so slots and one item takes up one slot. So if you have two of the same items, you’ll take up two slots. Though you can expand on space by buying bags, its just not helping the problem. Managing these items can be a real pain. If there were a much simpler and cleaner menu system where you can scroll through items, consumable items, and potions, it would be much more intuitive and would greatly speed up the game play. Rather then stopping the action to scroll through a cluttered inventory, it would’ve been much nicer to be able to place items on shortcuts to use on the go.
The difficulty can be punishing in Odin Sphere. Engaging a boss battle with a button-mashing mentality will get you killed in no time. You’ll encounter plenty of enemies, though each character faces the identical enemy. There’s the small dwarves who chuck destructive grenades that’ll kill you in one blow, fairies that fly and fire from a bow, ghouls that likes to play cheap by disappearing and re-appearing to attack, and annoying wizards who frequently teleports away and throws projectiles in your direction. The bosses you’ll encounter are huge and beautiful to look at. They’ll attack in patterns, so if you didn’t get it right the first time, you can start over on that stage and try again. Now the problem here are the loading times. Every time you enter a stage or skip a cut-scene, you have to wait through a long loading screen that will take anywhere from 5-10 seconds. Another annoying problem I had was the additional loading time that comes after it. Once your character has been loaded onto the stage, the game needs to load the enemies, which may take another 5-7 seconds. It becomes a real problem when your in stages such as the Fire or Ice Kingdom, where health gradually decreases over time. There are exactly no plat forming elements either, and all the background looks the same for every stage, there’s just no reason why it should take so long to load identical stages, music, and enemies. Because of the long loading times, game play starts to feel like a drag. You’ll slay the same enemies over and over to complete the character’s perspective, start a new one character and hack the same identical enemies in the same stages all over. It starts to feel really shallow, as if the game is forcing you to replay it to get the true ending. In the end, the game play starts to feel like a chore, and your going to need frequent breaks to beat this game.
If you haven’t already notice, the graphics in Odin Sphere are one of a kind. They are simply 2-D masterpiece, and run very smooth in action. Though I do digress the stages all looking way too similar, they are still gorgeous to look at. I find myself moving my characters watching my character’s animation in awe. I admire every little details given into the graphics. It touched me the most when Mercedes licked her fingers after finishing a fruit, brilliant! Everything runs seamlessly and characters blend in really well with environments. However, the bosses have a really hard time running fluidly on the ps2. There are certain boss battles where there’s too many projectiles and enemies on screen at once, the game will lag to a crawl.
The sound department was actually pretty good. With a Japanese and English voice over option, you can play around with the audio a bit and both sounds really good. The music however doesn’t stand out much. It just remains good, nothing memorable. You have the generic battle theme that you’ll hear most of the time. Boss battles have a more upbeat music, a sense of urgency and life on the line feeling. If only the other music can offer the same feeling.
It will take anywhere from 25-30 hours to complete Odin Sphere. There are no replay incentives after completing the title. After hacking and slashing through identical stages and enemies for the 5th time, Odin Sphere is going to be gathering dust for awhile. The story is solid and catchy, the graphics shouts masterpiece, and the sounds fare well for the title. Boss battles will have you pull your hair out, but you’ll experience joy the moment you’ve realize their pattern and take them out. Because of its repetitive nature, Odin Sphere won’t be enjoyed by everyone. You’ll spend all your time in combat, there are no exploring here. Grinding is almost a necessity to take out major bosses, and load times are unacceptable. Those with perseverance will enjoy what Odin Sphere has to offer, my route was to take frequent breaks whenever it gets tedious. If you want a challenging RPG, Odin Sphere will gladly mop you against the floor. Enjoy it with caution.